D&D 5E Wounds and Vitality module, what default mechanics don't fit?

[Lalato]

In a 4e campaign we used a wound system based on a Dragon article. If you went below 0 hp during a combat,you had a chance of getting a wound. If it happened multiple times, you might get a serious wound.

If you got a wound, you drew a card to see what the effects were. It was fun!

 

[DDNFan]

From what Mearls says in the video it will actually be somewhat different from Star Wars d20.

If I'm interpreting correctly the main effect of wounds is to reduce your ability to sustain hit point (vitality) damage over the long term, but to me it doesn't sound like there is a separate pool of "wound points" or anything like that. I imagine they did something like that so a crazy crit will have some long-term consequences without turning things into rocket tag. Changing maximum hp to represent wounds hopefully means almost everything in the game besides the rules for getting a wound and healing them simply works without changes: You would still fall unconscious at 0 hp, etc.

I'm just guessing, but from the last sentence in the quote maybe they're doing something like reducing maximum hp by damage taken divided by 5 (round down).

I made a post suggesting and analyzing a very similar-sounding system a couple years ago so I'm pretty interested to see what they came up with.

Thank you so much for posting this, I'm very excited to try it.

 

[DDNFan]

In a 4e campaign we used a wound system based on a Dragon article. If you went below 0 hp during a combat,you had a chance of getting a wound. If it happened multiple times, you might get a serious wound.

If you got a wound, you drew a card to see what the effects were. It was fun!

Which Dragon mag #, do you remember? I'd be interested in reading that. I stopped reading dragon when our 4e campaign fizzed, around mid 2011.

 

[BryonD]

I'm ok with W/VP systems. But I'm a little concerned that this was listed as the available alternative.

There is a still a big difference between W/VP and 1E/2E/3E HP that don't just spring back on their own. I want that.
They have stated that playing like other editions will work. And this was consistent through multiple editions. So I'm presuming that they are still holding most of the cards back. The W/VP reference was probably much more a "for example, this is in there" than "this is the alternative". (or they dropped the ball badly here..... )

 

[RangerWickett]

I would call it a "Wound Points/Hit Points" system. Did that attack 'wound' me, or just 'hit' me? A 'hit' jostles me, bruises, draws a bit of blood, or causes short-term psychological fatigue. A 'wound' impairs me and has a consequence that lasts more than a day.

What I would want from a system like this is:

* PCs and most humanoid foes are mostly HP, with some WP. Big monsters are mostly WP, with little or no HP.

* Barring rare circumstances, you shouldn't be able to cause wounds without first depleting all of a character's HP. Exceptions might be when someone is paralyzed, a few specific spells or magic items that sever limbs (like Snape did in Harry Potter 7), and possibly 'skill challenges' to assassinate someone. (Not just Stealth vs. Perception, but a half dozen die rolls to get into perfect position to strike without alerting your target.)

* It should be possible to make called-shots against body parts when a foe is out of HP. Chop off beholder eyestalks or gouge out its central eye. Slash off hydra heads and cauterize the stump. Wound a dragon's wing so it has to land. Stuff like that.

* Make it hard to be repetitive. If all trolls have a ton of WP, and you figure out one time that chopping off a troll's leg makes it easy to kill, you shouldn't be able to always chop off its leg with certainty. Maybe it gets a save or something to only suffer a minor wound instead of a severe one.

 

[Ahnehnois]

The best part about adopting W&V ? Never debating these topics ever again.

The best part is that you've got more design space and more detail in an important yet neglected part of the rules. It probably would solve a lot of debates though, simply by making it clearer as to what each number corresponds to in the character's world.

-Damage on a miss can't work, at least not against the wounds part. I would be fine with vitality loss on a miss, which actually does make sense, although it's still weird that one never loses stamina for attacking. But you can't kill something on a miss, ever.

It still doesn't work for vitality. There are a number of other cheap or even possibly automatic ways of draining vitality that might be feasible, but an ability that kicks in specifically and only on a miss is never going to make sense, regardless of whether it's damaging your body or your pride.

At that point it becomes mere game mechanical or balance issues, and not philosophical or playstyle ones. I would suggest moderators of D&D websites even make subforums for fans of each playstyle because they are not really compatible visions of the game, and at that point the only thing to say is, we're playing different games, and that's that.

And then we'd have arguments over what constitutes a playstyle and what belongs where. Playstyle, while hardly unimportant, is something that resists categorization and is difficult to analyze on any broad basis.

 

[Psikerlord#]

In a 4e campaign we used a wound system based on a Dragon article. If you went below 0 hp during a combat,you had a chance of getting a wound. If it happened multiple times, you might get a serious wound.

If you got a wound, you drew a card to see what the effects were. It was fun!

I remember these, and thought they were ok. I much prefered the Paizo crit hit deck. It provides some lingering wounds style effects, subject to the DM filling in the details.

 

[ccooke]

Damn, I really wanted the "official" wounds system to use the Exhaustion mechanic. It's perfectly placed for it.

Oh well, I'll have to keep using my houserule

 

[Bluenose]

I sincerely hope the DMG V/WP system is "in name only" since the one was so disliked by the SW community, Star Wars Saga abandoned it for normal HP!

Star Wars Saga edition had the Condition Track and HP instead instead of V/WP. Which had certain problems of it's own, but might work as an alternative. Attacks higher than a characters Damage Threshold (I think I'm remembering the term correctly) could move a character down the condition track as well as inflicting hit point damage. As you moved down that, you started taking penalties to rolls you made, -1 at first and increasing. Iirc you would die reaching the bottom of the condition track, running out of hit points meant you couldn't fight any more. Restoring hit points was rather easy, getting someone back up the CT was harder.

 

[JonWake]

Mike Mearls mentioned that he was working on the Wounds / Vitality system for 5e based on Wounds reducing your Max HP, like energy drain does. He mentioned that it was set up so a portion of damage went to reducing Max HP, so if you have 10 HP and are hit with 8 damage, your current HP is 2 but your MAX HP is say, 6.
My question is how to divide this up? You probably don't want Crits to all go straight to reducing Max HP, and you probably don't want to have to track a reduction in HP each time you're hit.
What if you reduce Max HP if the damage is greater than your CON score?